Haskell Weekly News: September 6, 2008

Welcome to issue 84 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

This is the "This issue is not late since the HWN will henceforth be
published on Saturday now that I have real work to do" edition. Featured
this week: darcs hacking sprint plans solidify, xmonad 0.8 released, typed
sprintf and sscanf, and tons of discussion about everything from functional
references to splitting up the base library to the future direction of
Haskell.

darcs weekly news #2. Eric Y. Kow
The second weekly issue of the darcs weekly news
has been published.

xmonad 0.8 released!. Don Stewart
announced
the release of xmonad 0.8,
featuring a general purpose "gaps" replacement, locale support, the
ability to create your own configuration parsers, and various other enhancements
and fixes.

ICFP09 Announcement. Matthew Fluet
announcedICFP 2009, to
be held 31st August to 2nd September 2009 in Edinburgh. ICFP provides a
forum for researchers and developers to hear about the latest work on the
design, implementations, principles, and uses of functional programming.

Fast parallel binary-trees for the shootout: Control.Parallel.Strategies
FTW!. Don Stewart
announced
that the Computer Language Shootout recently got a quad core 64 bit
machine, and outlined a plan and some initial results for porting the
Haskell entries to take advantage of the available parallelism.

The initial view on typed sprintf and sscanf. oleg
announced
an implementation of typed sprintf and sscanf functions sharing the same
formatting specifications, which also led to some interesting discussion
and alternative proposals.

Discussion

Generalize groupBy in a useful way?. Bart
Massey
proposed
changing the implementation of groupBy to extend its usefulness for
predicates which are not equivalence relations.

Splitting SYB from the base package in GHC 6.10. Jose Pedro
Magalhaes
initiated
a discussion regarding splitting the SYB libraries out of the base
package for GHC 6.10.

The base library and GHC 6.10. Ian Lynagh
initiated a discussion
on further splitting up the base package for GHC 6.10.

Functional references. Tim Newsham
began a discussion
on functional references and the possibility of merging the existing four
or five implementations into something more standard.

Types and Trees. Matt Morrow
wrote
something about types and type representations, involving some
commutative diagrams and some code. I haven't read it yet but it looks
neat!

Research language vs. professional language. Ryan Ingram
started an interesting discussion
on the future direction(s) of the Haskell language.